Gone so Horribly Right
by aggroChevalier
Summary: Desmond Miles doesn't care that he's bled completely inside-out, or that someone more than Desmond Miles forged that opinion.


Desmond Miles is past the point of no return, but he doesn't care anymore. It used to be easy to care, but that was before when he still (thought he) fought it. 'It' being death, of a sort. Funny- he'd never _wanted_ to be an assassin (until it became so right) and because of that he'd never known the true nature of fatality. I'd been afraid of it really, like any other man: of both the literal and philosophical sense. There were the nightmares of waking up, looking in the mirror and seeing _my face, yet not my face_...

But it's okay now. Bleeding to death scared him once upon a time, but no more. Back then he could even imagine it as a knife, a pump. Lying on that table and cutting out his own, flooding him with the new (old) until there wasn't anything of _Desmond Miles_ alive anymore. Leeched out from every artery, ransacked and hijacked by genetic invaders: sires long, long dead. There were times when I could feel it _gushing out_.

That was how it had been for a while. Then that fear, along with fear of many other things, leaked out somewhere between Jerusalem and Venice, Venice and Rome.

But Desmond Miles had never expected anyone to come to his rescue, much less the foreign intruders taking root in his skull. But it made sense- they were just him (me) now, calling his flesh mine. They (he) wouldn't stand for it, when they (I) grew into his (my) skin, that's where the clot began. Every wound healed over clean. Broken bones, when set straight, seamed stronger. So much of Desmond's memories (re) made the man, and with several men mingling the product wasn't something to be fought against.

So he gave in. Poetry could relate a phoenix rebirth, ancient souls given breath and blood centuries after their death. Desmond Miles held my ashes, Desmond Miles as my pyre.

But Desmond still mixes drinks from time to time, and when I do I see what flowery words could only hint at: my condition (victory) in miniature. It did make Desmond (me) smile to equate the fearsome Altair (myself), the infamous Ezio (I), to shots of liquor in a glass. One part per each, stirred, in a deadly cocktail that had killed men (easily), killed subjects (but not me) before. It would have made me mad in any other circumstance... but to know, feel their (my) thoughts as his (my) own, it ran a sharp undercurrent that Desmond could taste and it was (in) toxic. (ating)

Desmond can't unmix a drink. What's been concocted in this mind can't be reversed. Certainly if Desmond is me, he (I) won't mind, and really, what dead (alive again) man would?

The others are beginning to worry about him. Desmond Miles doesn't care anymore about that, either. Things were the way they were. They asked about hallucinations, I don't see them, and I didn't have to lie. What was outside Desmond's eyes is safely inside his head, and I won't bother with kills unless it was his (my) hands at work. Desmond Miles was okay. Just the same as always. A lie, that last one, but he said it anyway because it was true. It really always had been, lurking too deep to touch. Being turned inside-out was hardly his fault, and did it matter they didn't know who they were talking to when they said (one of my) name (s)?

It made them flinch when Desmond Miles (I) would snap at Malik (Sean) when I meant Sean (Malik). And it frightened them when Desmond would backpedal in (my) dated italian. They all saw ghosts sometimes. Especially when the old muscle-memory took hold, when they notice the body harden strong and grow out of passing as _bartender, rides motorcycles,_ as if possessing spirits meld it into something more like (my) home. (It's mine now)

Sometimes I laugh for Desmond Miles when (he) I can't hear me. These people have been asking for it, and here Desmond is. Better than any of them at their own games, and he never had wanted it in the first place. Their rescue and pet project gone so horribly, horribly right. I'm everything they had wanted him to become, and more.

But so is Altair.

And so is Ezio.

The others are never quite sure about me anymore. Where one ends another begins and we're (I'm) all the same anyway, bled together to make Desmond Miles and maybe an ultimate end.

Whose end that is, I don't know. I'm past the point of no return, so I can't say.

It's hard to care when most of you is happy to be alive again. Even when it means the rest of you's going to die. Or kill.

It's all the same now.


End file.
